Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

Xah Lee wrote:
> of interest.
> 
> • 〈What's Passive Voice? What's Aggresive Voice?〉 
> http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/active_voice_passive_voice.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------- What's Passive 
> Voice? What's Aggresive Voice?
> 
> Xah Lee, 2010-10-02
> 
> In writing, you know that there is passive voice and active voice, 
> right? And the writing style guilds tell us, that we should use 
> active voice. In the following sentences, can you tell which is 
> active voice and which is passive voice?
> 
> * (1) At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard. * (2) There 
> were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground. * (3) It was 
> not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had. * 
> (4) The reason that he left college was that his health became 
> impaired.
> 
> Take 5 min to answer before you read on.
> 
> The Language Log recently has a blog asking readers to identify 
> passive/active voice. (Apparantly, they've been beating this horse 
> for a while, but i only started to read Language Log last month.) 
> Before i tackle the question and post my redoubtable comment with 
> implicit offense at grammarians, i thought to myself: it's been some 
> 17 years when i read anything technical about passive/active voice in
> Struck & White... so let me look into Wikipedia to refresh myself 
> just so i won't come out a fool.
> 
> So, my first stop is at: Passive voice. And WHAM! It is 
> incomprehensible, and to ME!? To understand the article well, i'll 
> have to delve into my brain and read it carefully about all the 
> “subject”, “verb”, “object”, “adjective”, “adverb”, “aux verb”, and 
> perhaps reacquaint myself with the evil “split infinitives”. Fuck 
> that. By my mastery of info age, i took the shortcut and went 
> directly to the article English passive voice instead. The article 
> there is still a bit dense, but i found the above 4 examples about 
> passive voice, quoted right from “Strunk & White”, except that 3 of 
> them are actually active voice! The source of this is from:
> 
> * 〈50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice〉 (2009-04-17) By Geoffrey K 
> Pullum. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. chronicle.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Quote:
> 
> The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which 
> it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp
>  platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not 
> improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has 
> significantly degraded it.
> 
> ...
> 
> What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being 
> retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they 
> don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four
>  pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to 
> correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken 
> diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is 
> correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all
>  errors: ...
> 
> * “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has 
> no sign of the passive in it anywhere. * “It was not long before she 
> was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing 
> that is even reminiscent of the passive construction. * “The reason 
> that he left college was that his health became impaired” is 
> presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that's a 
> mistake. It's an adjective here. “Become” doesn't allow a following 
> passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became 
> issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)

True, but this is not a clear cut case. As in computer programming so
with grammar: it's a lot like nailing jelly to a tree. It's not invalid
to consider "to become" as the inchoative aspect of the verb "to be."
Adjectives derived from participles are infected with passivity from the
get-go.

> 
> So here we are.


Within the top 100 on the planet!!?? In the English language?
The following constellated words, phrases and clauses are either
erroneous or at least infelicities of style. You could look it up.

> 
> I pride myself **as a** [on being a]good writer (**n** [and] **i'd** [I'd] like to think 
> within [the] top 100 on this earth), albeit [one] with unique usage and 
> style. (See: The Writing Style on XahLee.org.) I read “Strunk & 
> White”'s The Elements of Style in the early 1990s,

Either no quotes around authors' names or at least 's inside quotes.
_The Elements of Style_ [title emphasized]

 **i** [this
> Cummingsesque cutsiness is inappropriate except on Twitter] **i** [I] think 
> twice, among quite a few other writing guides and **advices** [not 
> plural in English without being somehow qualified]. I've seen 
> countless **advices** for active voice in the past 20 years, 
> everywhere. For example, here's quote from GNU Emacs Lisp Reference 
> Manual: Documentation Tips. Quote:
> 
> Write documentation strings in the active voice, not the passive, and
>  in the present tense, not the future. For instance, use “Return a 
> list containing A and B.” instead of “A list containing A and B will
>  be returned.”

As usual, sound advice from the Emacs developers.

> 
> Not until today, **i** realized, just how much **i** did not 
> understand what is Active voice and Passive voice, and when you look 
> into this issue, **such as** [by for example reading]a Wikipedia 
> article on it, you see that it is quite technical. Unless you have a 
> **good study** [pretty muddy for something: understanding, 
> background??]  of linguistics, you **wouldn't** [violates sequence of
>  tenses] understand it. And of course, the common **advices** on 
> [the] “active” voice, even from professional style guides, are just 
> totally **clueless.** [too slangy for incompetent, impertinent, 
> misleading, or something]
> 
> Today, “passive voice” simply means sentences that do not sound 
> dynamic or in action. The word “passive” in “passive voice” just mean
>  the opposite of “aggresive”. So, if a sentence sounds **lame** 
> [generically pejorative but of uncertain denotation], it is passive 
> voice! [Maybe in the semi-private language of some spritually inbred
>  subculture] And, actually, for **pop** [popular?? informal??] 
> communication, **i** think **i** endorse this interpretation; 
> **screw** [too slangy for "deprecate," or better, passively,
> "linguistic history should be deprecated," NOT!] linguistic history.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! In the passive voice, the original active voice
object becomes the subject and the verb is converted to copula plus
participle (in English).

> 
> Here's one of the article from Language Log about this issue:
> 
> * 〈“Passive Voice” — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.〉 (2009-03-12) By Mark 
> Liberman. At: Language Log

Unde annus ille 1397timus? Liberman eum e petaso extraxit, nonne?
Sorry, couldn't resist.

> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> 
> PS for those who got it wrong, don't feel bad. Few people on this 
> earth can get it right, and most of them **mob** [just a typo, I 
> realize, but the effect is ridiculous] toilets at McDonald[']s. [or 
> McDonalds', i.e. possesive, not plural] Just be happy that we all 
> understand split infinitives, at least.

Yes, by their very nature, infinitives are split in English: "to love"
vs. "amare." There's no room in the atom "amare" to insert anything.
Still, good writers know how to imitate Latinate style, when
appropriate. Jonathan Swift, for example, a consummate stylist, used few
if any split infinitives.

Ed

> 
> Xah ∑ xahlee.org ☄